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The Five Levels of Attachment: Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World
The Five Levels of Attachment: Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World
The Five Levels of Attachment: Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World
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The Five Levels of Attachment: Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World

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Do you hold your beliefs? Or do your beliefs hold you?
 
In this groundbreaking work, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. writes that we have all unwittingly made agreements about how we think we should live our lives and what we believe our personal truths are.

But what most of us do not realize is that each one of these agreements represents an attachment, a limiting filter on who we think we are, and what our future could hold.

The Five Levels of Attachment provides you with a measuring stick to understanding how tied you are to any belief, idea, or opinion. Each level represents how controlled you are by your own particular way of thinking.

Armed with the awareness of which beliefs and ideas you are most attached to, you can better navigate the recurring situations in your life that cause you suffering, release any unhealthy beliefs that are no longer serving you, and create a future that is in alignment with your true and authentic self.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 1, 2013
ISBN9781938289125
The Five Levels of Attachment: Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World
Author

Don Miguel Ruiz

Don Miguel Ruiz es el autor de varios best sellers internacionales, entre los que se incluyen The Four Agreements (más de siete años en la lista de best sellers del New York Times) The Mastery of Love, The Voice of Knowledge y es coescritor de The Fifth Agreement. Ruiz ha dedicado su vida a compartir la sabiduría de los antiguos toltecas a través de sus libros, conferencias y viajes a sitios sagrados alrededor del mundo.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
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    Easy to follow and understand. He has a great way of getting to the point. Loved this book. Thanks
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
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    An excellent book that lays a foundation of our natural reactions & Responses as we go through the us and downs of life. The simple language used in the book is easy to understand and by implementing the suggestions one can help manage the relationships better and lead a very balanced life.

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The Five Levels of Attachment - Don Miguel Ruiz

Introduction

Everything is made of light. We are the stars; and the stars are us. When we see this, all of our senses are truly open and there is no need to interpret the world. In this moment, our full, unlimited potential is available to us. There is nothing blocking our way. . . .

—DON MIGUEL RUIZ, THE FOUR AGREEMENTS

My father, don Miguel Ruiz, a teacher and retired medical doctor, spent many thoughtful and transformative years interpreting our Toltec traditions to fit the world we live in today. The Toltecs were great women and men of knowledge who lived thousands of years ago in the area that is now known as south central Mexico. In the Nahuatl language, Toltec means artist, and according to our teachings, the canvas for our art is life itself. I learned about the Toltec way of life through the oral traditions of my family, who (according to my paternal great-great-grandfather, don Exiquio) are direct descendants of the Toltecs of the Eagle Knight lineage. This knowledge came to me by way of my grandmother, Madre Sarita.

We call ourselves Toltecs not just because of our lineage, but because we are artists. Life is the canvas of our art, and the work of our tradition is to teach the life lessons that will help us create our masterpiece.

The Toltec tradition is not a religion, but rather a way of life in which our great masterpiece is living in happiness and love. It embraces spirit while honoring the great many masters of all of the world's traditions. The whole point of all this work is to be happy, to enjoy life, and to enjoy the relationships with the people we love the most, starting with oneself.

I began my apprenticeship into my family's tradition in San Diego, California, when I was fourteen years old. My seventy-nine-year-old grandmother, Madre Sarita, was my teacher and the spiritual head of our family. She was a curandera, a faith healer who helped people in her small temple in Barrio Logan, a neighborhood in San Diego, with the power of her faith in God and love. Since my father was a medical doctor, the juxtaposition of the two forms of healing allowed me to see our tradition through different points of view.

I appreciated the power of my grandmother's words long before I had a firm grasp of their meaning. I also saw things that others could only describe as magic transformed into everyday happenings; miraculous healings were the norm for Madre Sarita. I still felt a strong pull from the outside world, though—the allure of hanging out with my friends, of being like everyone else. I moved back and forth between the Toltec world of my family and the mainstream world of school and friends, constantly struggling to find a way to combine my experiences and yet keep them separate at the same time.

Though she spoke no English, my grandmother gave sermons and lectures across the country. My apprenticeship began with translating my grandmother's lectures from Spanish to English. For many years, I awkwardly stumbled over her words, and my grandmother would just look at me and laugh.

One day she asked me if I knew why I stumbled. I had all sorts of answers: you are speaking too quickly, you don't give me a chance to catch up, some words don't have a direct translation. . . . She just looked at me silently for a few moments and then asked, Are you using knowledge, or is knowledge using you?

I looked at her blankly. She continued, "When you translate, you try to express my words through what you already know, what you think is true. You do not hear me; you hear yourself. Imagine doing the same thing every single moment in life. If you are looking through life and translating it as it goes along, you will miss out on living it. But if you learn to listen to life, you will always be able to express the words as they come. Your knowledge has to become a tool you will use to guide you through life but that can also be put aside. Do not let knowledge translate everything you experience."

I nodded in response, but it didn't dawn on me until many years later what my grandmother was truly talking about. Throughout life, we constantly narrate, or commentate on, everything we do, say, see, touch, smell, taste, and hear. As natural storytellers, we continuously keep the plot moving forward, sometimes missing millions of subplots that are developing on their own. It is like taking a sip of wine and saying, It's a bit dry; it has definitely aged well, but I can taste the bark. I've had better. Instead of simply experiencing the joy and flavors of the wine, we are analyzing the flavor, trying to break it down and fit it into a context and language we already know. In doing this, we miss out on much of the actual experience.

This is a simple example of how we narrate life— explaining it, but, more importantly, justifying and judging it. Instead of taking an experience for what it is, we create a story to make it fit our beliefs. During Madre Sarita's talks, I had to completely shut down my thoughts, because if my mind's commentary got in the way I would miss out on her message. With this simple process, my grandmother showed me that if we only see the world through the filters of our preconceptions, we are going to miss out on actually living. After much practice, I eventually learned to close my eyes, shut out the world that existed outside my head, and translate every single word she said accurately.

Seeing beyond our filters—our accumulated knowledge and beliefs—does not always come naturally. We have spent years growing attached to them in various degrees, and they feel safe. Whatever we become attached to can begin to shape our future experiences and limit our perception of what exists outside our vocabulary. Like blinders on a horse, our attached beliefs limit our vision, and this in turn limits our perceived direction in life. The stronger our level of attachment, the less we can see.

Think about your set of attached beliefs as a unique melody repeating itself in your mind. In a way, we are constantly trying to force our melody—the one we have become accustomed to hearing—onto other melodies, without realizing that often the melody is not our own, and perhaps it's not even the one we want to be playing. If we continue playing only what we know, never opening ourselves to listen to the other songs flowing around us, we are letting our attachment to our particular melody control us. Instead, choose to listen to other melodies playing. Perhaps you will contribute to them, adding a harmony or a bass line and just seeing where the music takes you. By letting go of your attachment to what you think the melody should be, you open yourself to the potential to create a unique and beautiful song of your own composition or a collaboration that can be shared with others.

In this book, I will teach you the Five Levels of Attachment. They are guideposts for gauging how attached you are to your own point of view, as well as how open you are to other opinions and possibilities. As the level of attachment increases, one's identity, the who I am, becomes more directly linked with knowledge, or the what I know.

Knowledge and the information we perceive are distorted and corrupted by our narrators—the voices of our thoughts that debate the rightness or wrongness of every action we take and every thought we have. When we believe in something so strongly that we lose the awareness of our Authentic Self within the stories and comments of our internal narrators, we are allowing our preconceptions to make our decisions for us. Therefore, it is important to be aware of where we are on the scale of attachment with any particular belief. With awareness, we can regain the power to make our own decisions.

It is my hope that you will engage this book to measure how attached you are to various beliefs and ideas in your life that create your reality, your Personal Dream, and contribute to our collective reality and the Dream of the Planet. Only with this deeper awareness of yourself are you truly free to pursue your passion and experience your full potential. The choice is up to you!

CHAPTER 1

An Exploration of Perception and Potential

Our point of view creates our reality. When we are stuck in our beliefs, our reality becomes rigid, stagnant, and oppressive. We become bound to our attachments because we have lost our ability to recognize that we have a choice to be free of them.

When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we often hear a narrative in our mind of what we see, a definition of self in the form of an identity that is based on our agreements—the thoughts and beliefs we have said yes to. This identity stems from ideological beliefs that have come to us over a period of time from our family, culture, religion, education, friends, and beyond, and these beliefs are encapsulated into a single system that is represented in the reflected image of a physical living being—in my case, a living being named Miguel Ruiz Jr., with a point of view that is

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